


Three Seconds

by AnotherAnon0



Series: Seeking... Something [4]
Category: Biohazard | Resident Evil (Gameverse)
Genre: Character Death, Child Abuse, Child Neglect, Depression, Guilt, Heavy Angst, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Murder, POV Alternating, Psychological Trauma, Religion, implied past CSA
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-17
Updated: 2020-05-17
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:26:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,277
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24238768
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnotherAnon0/pseuds/AnotherAnon0
Summary: UBCS are deployed to Raccoon City / Murphy and Nicholai come to a painful end / Nicholai reflects.Five vignettes concluding the "Seeking... Something" series.~It was three seconds.Three seconds between the time Murphy's hazel eyes flashed towards him, and the moment he pulled the trigger.Three seconds. An eternity too long.
Relationships: Murphy Seeker/Nicholai Zinoviev
Series: Seeking... Something [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1746628
Comments: 8
Kudos: 15





	Three Seconds

**Author's Note:**

  * For [FanFicReader01](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FanFicReader01/gifts), [xXxBishopxXx](https://archiveofourown.org/users/xXxBishopxXx/gifts), [lordbhreanna](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lordbhreanna/gifts).



> Please heed the tags! 
> 
> Part 4, and the final part, of "Seeking... Something."

**Five.**

"You _still_ don't think I'm good enough!" Murphy bellowed, voice hitched in shaky anxiety. "It's never **fucking** enough for you!" 

Nicholai stood in silence as the younger man ranted, pacing the small office like a caged animal. His jaw was clenched, eyes locked on the head of strawberry blond hair that was hunched into the poorly-postured, broad shoulders.

"Five months I've been training! _Five_ months! I've gotten perfect **fucking** scores!" Murphy stalked up to the older man, their noses inches away, "And that's still not good enough?"

"You don't understand." Nicholai's voice was barely above a pensive whisper. 

"Then tell me. What other reason is there??" Murphy snarled, " _ **Why**_ don't you want me to go to Raccoon City?"

The Russian couldn't speak. He knew he looked pathetic. Murphy's reddened nostrils flared in a mixture of disgust and anger as he assessed the look on Nicholai's face. It was one he had never witnessed before, but one he didn't care to consider too deeply in his rage.

"Fuck you." He spat, hazel eyes glassy with outrage, "I'm goin' tonight and you can't stop me. I got mission orders."

Nicholai closed his eyes, breathing slowly through his nose as the younger man exited his office, slamming the door behind him loudly in an effort to convey his righteous fury.

Murphy's smell lingered in his place, continuing the accusatory tirade in a silent war in his mind. The smell drew up memories and sparked embers of happiness in his chest he knew he didn't deserve. The smell was pointing at the manila folder tucked in the second-left drawer of his desk, one with his contract. The smell was telling him he was going to burn in hell.

Nicholai ran his hand down his new fatigue, feeling the buckles, the zippers, the pouches. He winced.

Internally, he was telling Murphy exactly why he shouldn't go. 

Internally, he was holding the boy by the shoulders and screaming the reason into his face until the realisation set into those deep hazel eyes. 

Internally, he knew he was already dead.

~

**Four.**

"Quick, Nicholai, this is bad luck, baby."

Ekaterina held her son's hand tightly as she marched through the snowy banks of the Kapotnya ghetto, hoping to make it to the church before service started. Nicholai rushed behind her, tiny legs trying to keep up with the frantic pace of his mother's swishing skirt. Even with her limp, she was determined to make it on time.

They wouldn't have had to rush had father not been late for work that day. He wouldn't have been late for work had he not been hungover. Again.

The Orthodox Cathedral was the most expensive building in the impoverished Okrug district. Elaborate golden onion domes loomed judgementally over the dirty, broken government-subsidised housing complexes. It was a 30-minute trek through the snow in wet shoes for Eketerina and Nicholai -- but she was devoted, and the safety of the Church was a relief that stretched her sanity into the next, desperate day.

When he was younger, Nicholai would sometimes cry for the pain of numb feet during their long walk, forcing his mother to carry him for as long as her weak arms could sustain it, but now he tried his best to walk the whole way. He was proud his mother didn't have to carry him anymore. She told him how proud she was.

Approaching the white-and-gold Church, Ekaterina sighed in relief to see the Patriarch still standing outside the door, ringing a bell and greeting the last devotees with a rosy-cheeked smile. 

"We made it, thank Jesus. No bad luck today." She smiled down at her son, adjusting her old, torn headscarf in an attempt to ensure the blossomed bruised on the side of her cheek was as covered as it could be by the dingy fabric. She bowed deeply as she walked up the short steps to where the Patriarch stood, greeting him reverently. 

"Hello, daughter! Welcome." The man grinned, tucking the bell in the belt of his intricate robe as the mother and her son became the last parishioners to greet, "Oh, and I _finally_ get to see the little one up close."

Ekaterina beamed as the Patriarch assessed her child, she patted him on the back, encouraging him to move from behind her skirt, "This is my son, Nicholai."

"He must be four now, yes?" The jovial Patriarch asked, smiling down at the small, skinny boy. The fat, white-bearded man grunted in the soreness of age as he slowly dropped to one knee, adjusting his round glasses, "My name is Mikhail, nice to meet you little Nicholai."

"Mikhail..."

Ekaterina gasped, tugging at her son's arm, "Don't be rude! You call him _Pochtenyy_!"

"Now, now..." The elder smiled, wide blue eyes fixated on the young child as he reached out to dance a sausage-like finger along the boy's cold-flushed lips, "We are friends, aren't we, Nicholai? You can call me whatever you want."

The devoutly religious mother's eyes widened in a near-tearful joy when the Priest asked if she would be willing to leave her son behind a few services per week for free, private Orthodoxy lessons.

She clutched her rosary in excitement when he told her that he just knew her son was _special_ and destined for _great things._

She thanked the Patriarch for the opportunity profusely each service she left him behind, waving goodbye to the small boy who seemed more and more reluctant to stay every time for reasons she couldn't quite understand.

~

**Three.**

It was three seconds.

Three seconds between the time Murphy's hazel eyes flashed towards him, and the moment he pulled the trigger. 

Three seconds. An eternity too long. 

Nicholai was glad the woman had initially gasped away in horror, the extra seconds of makeshift privacy giving him a moment to steel his jaw and set his eyebrow before she accosted him with her ignorant screeching. He ignored the first curses cast his way. He knew she wouldn't understand the significance of the tiny crouch he dipped to make beside the young man's boot as she quickly moved to stand. The way his fingers danced over the side of Murphy's leg in a final touch. The quick assessment of his rolled-back eyes. Eyes that had looked into his innumerable times with love, humour, affection. Eyes that had spoken to him, glistened at him, teared for him. 

Those hazel eyes would be gone soon. Fading. Decaying. Nicholai knew he would be haunted by them for the rest of his life.

"He was infected."

_He wasn't._

"He **_MIGHT_** have been infected!"

_He wasn't._

He wanted to get away. He put his back towards her as quickly as he could, trying to keep his pace steady, stalking his shoulders as he walked so as to look composed.

She was still harping at him. He flung calculated, robotic responses at her, hoping she'd shut up and leave him alone to make his slow elopement towards anywhere else but there, where Murphy's smell was accosting him around every navigable inch, calling him what he was.

_Murderer._

"And what are you?! UBCS? Killing your own people!?"

_Yes._

He stopped, tongue running across his bottom lip before dismounting from the step he'd just climbed and moving closely to obscure her entire sensory landscape. He tried to look intimidating, eyes baring into hers with a steel-like precision... but he couldn’t focus. His peripheral vision kept darting to catch the fresh splatters of red on her cheek. _His_ blood.

"He would have _**turned**_!" He snarled, nostrils flaring in an outrage he only had towards himself, telling a lie intended to suppress the nausea bubbling up his throat.

"Where is your sense of self-preservation?" Words that were meant for the young man who hadn't wanted to listen to him and stay behind.

He told her to go back to the Subway station as he ascended the stairs.

He called her a bleeding heart. 

_Better than being a lunatic like me._

~

**Two.**

Sitting on the rooftop edge in a brief moment of respite, Nicholai recalled the time Murphy had told him about his life. 

It had been a hot August day. Training had ended just as twilight was cupping the horizon, and Murphy had followed him behind the complex where he snuck to enjoy one of his forbidden cigarettes. He had initially berated the young man for the risky move, telling him to go to the canteen with the others, but quickly gave in to the hardheaded company. 

They'd lay on the grass, protected by the safe screen of the old birch trees that divided the UBCS property from the forest. Murphy put his head on Nicholai's arm. Nicholai let him. Birds sang as the evening coolness drifted in, and for a moment -- things were perfect.

The younger man told him about the Marines. About the gangsters who had killed his brother. About murdering them using a rifle he'd stolen from the U.S Army barracks. About prison. Nicholai had listened in silence, and wiped the boy's tears away when they came with the corner of the shirt he'd discarded to enjoy the sunshine.

" _So you're right when you say I'm a headcase_." He'd blubbered.

" _So am I. Mr. lunatic, remember?_ " The response had prompted a sobbing laugh.

_"Just lunatic, not Mister."_

Nicholai blinked away the memories, watching them fall to the destroyed city below. He stuck the dwindling cigarette between his lips, freeing up his hands to retrieve the neatly folded paperwork out of his front pocket, opening them like a delicate origami. 

Two million dollars. 

That was the base salary for his contract. He folded the papers up again along their seams and slipped them back in their place, taking a deep, final inhale of the red-and-white tube before flicking it away unceremoniously.

"Seeker." He exhaled. 

It would be easy enough to find Murphy's family. He knew where the boy was from. 

Money wires were quick nowadays. And the seedy 24-hour shops in the destitute parts of any city could send them anonymously. 

~

**One.**

Holy Saint Yaropolk's Orthodox Church was addressed _1 Hodgson Avenue,_ chipper cursive text announced its location on a wooden sign that was barely hanging on to the small fence that was barely standing along its perimeter. 

It was Ukrainian, not Russian, but Nicholai figured it was close enough.

Against the brown plaster exterior of the petit building, he leaned his rifle near the large wooden door, using the nearby, cracked planter to deposit his handgun and dagger. For a moment, he wondered why he was so confident there was nothing that could hurt him inside despite the shattered windows. For a moment, he wondered if he was simply suicidal. 

The door opened with a hollow groan. He'd been wondering if he would remember anything from his youth, mother quietly hauling him to Church whenever the man who called himself his father was at work, but the moment the familiar smell of rose-washed rosaries cut through the stench of the city behind him, recollections hastily nestled at the front of his mind. Memories he wanted, and memories he didn't. 

Idle hands moved from arm to arm to pull down his hiked-up sleeves, suddenly conscious of his inappropriately exposed skin.

_There is nothing to to be done. I am sorry._

Head bowed, he raised his left hand to touch three fingers to his forehead, then his stomach, finally to each shoulder. Crossing the threshold, he repeated the process, closing the door behind him after he was finished.

The church was small and muted compared to the ones in Russia -- but the alter, looming an accusatory gaze at him from the back of the room, was still beautiful -- lined with dozens of large, gold-framed portraits of Icons he'd not seen in years. The chandelier that had hung over them had fallen, and some damage to the church had come through Raccoon City's days of torment -- pews scrambled and stained-glass window strewn about the red carpet -- but a massive, gold crucifix still proudly stood in defiance at the centre of the room. 

Nicholai pulled a long candle from the mostly-empty wooden box in the short foyer, approaching the crucifix with a slow reverence. The round, red-tinted glass offerings table had broken, but Nicholai was able to draw a large piece of the shattered surface from the pile and set it at the foot of the cross. It would do for now.

The candle was quickly lit with a lighter he drew from his fatigue pocket, taking a moment to drip wax onto the makeshift table before setting the bottom of the candle into it so it would stand alone. The amber light cast off of the gold-plated nailed feet hanging inches from his face, a mirror reflecting an image he did not want to see.

"I am not asking for forgiveness." He muttered, eyes dancing from the wispy flame of the candle up towards the Holy man looking down upon him from the crucifix.

The candle cracked. The undead orchestra of Raccoon City hummed through the broken windows. Nicholai shifted his gaze to the icons judging him from the back of the room. In one, Mother Mary cradled baby Jesus against her chest, an accusatory finger cast just out of frame at the sins of the world. 

"Mama said that when people you love die they look over you." Nicholai swallowed, voice hushed, "I don't want that. I want them to forget about me."

He pretended he didn't feel the tears running down the sides of his nose, or the familiar burn of anguish at the back of his throat.

"I just want to be alone. Forever."

**Author's Note:**

> First, translation: Pochtenyy = Father/Reverend. How a Patriarch in the Russian Orthodox Church would be addressed. 
> 
> ~
> 
> Welcome to angst-city. I will be your guide. 
> 
> This was uhh.. I wanted to say "Fun," but I can't quite say that after THIS EMOTIONAL MESS. 
> 
> I want to thank my three muses for literally inspiring me with every comment to write a new part of this series. Literally that is why I gifted these last two parts to you. You all gave me ideas every time you commented so this is literally YOUR WORK as much as it is mine <3 You deserve the credit! Please go and read their stories!! They are amazing!
> 
> If you have not, please do read the other three parts (Seeking... Something, Da is Yes, and Daddy issues), there are Easter eggs that sort of weave all of the parts together. I do this intentionally, never revealing where those eggs are. I did this in Toxic as well. It makes it more fun that way. Subconsciously altering your reading experience! mwahahaha It is a bit more difficult when the series is not planned, like this one, but its still fun regardless to try and see how to link the parts up and create coherence where there.. isn't any :x
> 
> Love you <3


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